Agent-based models are increasingly being used to simulate and analyze various transportation problems, from traffic flow [15] to air traffic control [1]. One transportation industry that has not received as much attention from the multi-agent systems community is seaport container terminals. It can be argued that the operations that take place at a container terminal are as complex as that of ...

A container terminal represents a complex system with highly dynamic interactions between the various handling, transportation and storage units and incomplete knowledge about future events. Hence, decentralized planning is the only realistic mode to govern logistics control of automated container terminals. We classify the specific logistics planning and control issues arising in seaport conta...

Keywords: Container terminal Maritime shipping Block length Yard crane deployment Simulation Terminal design Gross crane rate As more and more container terminals open up all over the world, terminal operators are discovering that they must increase quay crane work rates in order to remain competitive. In this paper we present a simulation study that shows how a terminal's long-run average quay...

The problem of analysing operational policies for transhipping containers in a port container terminal is studied using an agent-based simulation approach. The decision makers involved in transhipment operations, i.e., the terminal manager, the port captain, the stevedores and the ship captains, as well as some of the operators of the physical resources, such as cranes and straddle carriers, ar...

This paper empirically evaluates container terminal service attributes from shipping lines and shipping agencies’ perspective. Some methods are applied for study, such as Internal-Consistency Reliability, Factor Analysis, Cluster Analysis, Importance-Satisfaction Analysis and analysis of variance. The results suggest that customers perceive reliability of the agreed vessel sailing time to be th...

Design of container terminal operations is complex because multiple factors affect the operational performance. These factors include: topological constraints, a large number of design parameters and settings, and stochastic interactions that interplay among the quayside, vehicle transport, and stackside processes. In this research, we propose new integrated queuing network models for rapid des...

The decomposition of planning and scheduling problems is a well known technique to make these problems tractable. The resulting dependable subproblems were often solved using different planning systems. In this article we focus on an example from the container terminal management. We point out the dependencies between the planning systems. Using a subset of the container terminal management pro...

Although it has been only ten years in operations, Yantian International Container Terminals Limited (YICT) has evolved as a world-class container terminal and become the first Chinese port to receive the Best Global Container Port of the Year award for 2005–2006, as well as being designated China’s best container terminal in terms of operational efficiency for 2008. A success factor of YICT is...

We address the problem of storage space allocation in a sea port terminal. The problem consists of assigning a block space in the yard of a container terminal to every incoming container while ensuring operational efficiency. The proposed framework uses a 2-stage framework in combination with a fuzzy logic rule-based strategy. The concept is motivated by the problem faced by container terminals...